The 1971 Stanford Prison experiment was originally designed to investigate individual behavioral responses to the experience of the prison environment. It is back in the news on account of the release on a new film which dramatizes the events.
A group of college students, all of who volunteered to be a part of the experiment, were divided into two groups – wardens and inmates. The experiment was conducted under the direction of psychologist, Dr. Phillip Zimbardo, who acted as the prison superintendent. What occurred was an troubling example of how people conform their behavior to their environment. The disturbing result was that each group (including Zimbardo) so thoroughly inhabited their roles, leading to serious psychological consequences, that the study was called off after only 6 days, instead of running the planned two weeks. You hear Dr. Zimbardo reflect on the lessons he learned while conducting the experiment in a recent TED talk.
I have always been interested in the lessons we can learn from research such as the Stanford Prison experiment and how we can apply these insights to help us improve the ethical culture in our workplaces. Perhaps the most important take-away for me is the reminder that people often perform quite in line with the expectations communicated to them from above – specifically, how they interpret these expectations. We often like to think that individuals (especially ourselves!) would go ‘rogue’ in environments like the one constructed in the 1971 experiment, and hold fast to our ideas about ethical behavior and basic civility. But, unfortunately, many people do not. We quickly adapt to our environment, adopting shared norms and shared rationalizations.
I tell my undergraduate students that ‘culture matters’ for the person that you ultimately become. Even if you have the strength of character to resist the temptations of ‘going with the crowd’; why make things hard on yourself? Instead of asking about vacation time and opportunities for international travel, new graduates on the job market should pay careful attention to what they can glean about the ‘feel’ of the office and ‘how things are done’ in that organization.
I also tell groups of senior leaders that ‘culture matters’. There is a tendency to believe that ethical behavior is driven by exclusively ethical individuals, and that there is little that the organization can do to promote the ethical culture it seeks besides to hire the right people. While it is certainly important to ‘get the right people on the bus’, it is also important to focus on environments that make it easier, rather than harder for people to do the right thing.
Renewed attention to the results of Zimbardo’s experiment can give us a chance to reflect on the importance of our environment – and what we can do to contribut
Ethically Speaking 